The current list allows a great number of licenses which vary
greatly. This means that users may have to learn the in's and
out's of a lot of licenses. Also some of the license choices
impose comparatively high restrictions to the standard PHP
license (GPL, QPL ..). As PEAR aims to extend the functionality
provided by PHP users of PHP should fairly safely be able to also
use any PEAR package without licensing worries, be it for
commercial or non commercial, closed or opensource use.

Therefore with this announcement the license choices are reduced
to the following short list:

PHP License

Apache License

LGPL

BSD style

MIT License

Other licenses may be accepted on a case by case basis, but will
have to fit the above criteria. This decision has been made to
simplify the current situation, and as with all decisions is open
to be refined in the future using the RFC proposal methodology.

All packages, which are already part of PEAR as of now, which use
other licenses, do not need to follow this regulation.

In the meantime the FAQ entry linked above has also been
updated to reflect the decisions from this document.